The Golden Age of Ethereum: The Beginning of the Modular Blockchain Paradigm

Edit: Southwind

Edit: Southwind

Ethereum is scaling in a number of ways.

Ethereum is like a super city of economic activity, it runs 24/7, spans the globe, and allows anyone to access it. Unfortunately, Ethereum has always suffered from the collateral effects of its own success: many users have lost due to its high transaction costs. But don't worry, Ethereum scaling has arrived, and it's not just scaling in the form of the oft-talked-about L2 (second layer) —Ethereum is scaling on many different fronts!

A good analogy is that we can takeEthereum's Vertical Scaling (ie L2s)Imagine how a city can be built byhigh rise buildingto scale up. If a city consists of only 1-story buildings, the city will either need massive horizontal expansion of layer 1 (L1) (although this will still be limited and expensive), or will limit its growth to only those Those who can afford it live there. This is exactly the situation that Ethereum L1 is currently in, and it is also the situation where we build L2 scalability technologies (such asRollups、Validiumsor even sidechains).

data shardingdata sharding(data sharding) way to achieve.Data sharding will provide additional capacity for L2s(like building more tall buildings on new land). So not only can we build enough high-rise buildings (L2 capacity) to accommodate 10,000 people, we can build many more tall buildings to accommodate millions of people. Just like you can optimize the capacity of a tall building and optimize the layout of a city, you can do the same with Ethereum L1 and its L2 ecosystem. we are actually in theModular Blockchain Paradigmthe beginning.

Another thing that is not often mentioned is how EthereumExtend its social layer, or in other words, how Ethereum scales as its community grows. I think Ethereum achieves this by embracing the ethos of decentralization, which means not building the community through a top-down approach - no rulebook, no guidelines, no set of laws (other than code), of course There is no ruler in Ethereum City; instead, Ethereum operates more like a"market"- just asBen Edgington said, the Ethereum bazaar is "noisy and seemingly chaotic, but remarkably efficient and vibrant — and, crucially, yields better results (for open source software development)".

As you can see, Ethereum is in a very good position,Will be expanded in all important areas.In fact, I think for encrypted networks,social scalability(social scalability) is the most important thing because without it, the crypto network will effectively be a centralized network controlled by only a small group of people, and this is what we are trying to break with blockchain technology!

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The Golden Age of Ethereum

As someone who has been in the Ethereum ecosystem since early 2017, I can safely say that I have never been more optimistic about the future of Ethereum than I am today. After years of hard work, we are seeing EthereumL1 aspect(EIP-1559and other major upgrades),L2 aspect(Rollupsis striding forward) andapplication layer(DeFi、NFTs、DAOsetc.) results.We are in the golden age of Ethereum.

For me, what excites me the most is that the Ethereum ecosystem is really like a"City That Never Sleeps". There is something happening no matter the time of day, and you can use the Ethereum network anytime. Obviously, this is very similar to how the Internet has worked for a long time, but we never had adecentralizedanddecentralizedlet's start with

let's start with"merge"start. Amazing progress is being made on this front, and most developers involved in the development of the Ethereum consensus layer and execution layer are now focusing on completing the merger. as far as I know,Most of the core research on the merger has been completed and the respective client teams are making progress on related feature builds(The combined developer testnet and public testnet will go live in the coming months). Of course, we are still some time away from the merger of the mainnet(First or second quarter of 2022), but I believe that researchers and developers will spend as much time as possible to ensure that everything runs smoothly and safely. After all, this will be the biggest upgrade in the history of Ethereum - we want to get it right.

One thing that has become clearer to the entire Ethereum ecosystem over the past few months is thatHow Ethereum Will Scale: Rollups (and zero-knowledge techniques) are Schelling points that all scalability researchers/developers are currently working on, and they seem to have a general consensus that"Modular Blockchain"Design is the direction that Ethereum should work on; on this basis, in the future we will also implement data sharding (data sharding) to enhance these Rollups that require a large amount of data,Giving Rollups greater scalabilityhybrid solutionhybrid solutionat the same time,

at the same time,NFTs(Non-homogeneous tokens) have become non-encrypted native usersThe best and easiest tool to enter the Crypto space. The special thing about NFTs is that they are more friendly to new Crypto users, because the NFTs ecosystem is not full of complicated financial terms like DeFi. Most importantly, for ordinary people, the collection and trading of NFTs is more interesting and intuitive than financial activities-I mean, in the traditional financial system, when will ordinary people provide liquidity to what products? Don’t get me wrong, I still think DeFi will be a huge market, but it won’t be the “gateway” for most people into the Crypto space.

Finally, we now have many different forms ofDAOs(Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) exist in the Ethereum ecosystem, from old-school DAOs like Maker, to new-age DAOs in the “social token” ecosystem. However, there is a through line here -All of these DAOs focus on improving social and economic coordination among global players- All of these DAOs have no centralized intermediaries. When it comes to DAOs, I think it's possible to take a "full bloom" approach, which allows people to experiment quickly, innovate, and ultimately make progress.

The above is a brief explanation of why I think Ethereum is in its golden age, and I haven't even talked about things like DeFi and the emerging social token ecosystem. Of course, not every use case based on Ethereum will be successful in the long run (ICOs are one of them), but as an ecosystem, we will learn over time which use cases are alive and which are fleeting of.

Because after all, Ethereum allows you to build anything you want anywhere in the world.